The impact of oppression on motherhood in Morrison’s novels

• Main Author: Elvi
• Other Authors: Andrew Corey Yerkes
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/20787
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

After studying Ethnic American Literature module and reading one of the text, Beloved, I would like to do research on its author, Toni Morrison. In Beloved, Morrison applies elements of slave narrative and racial oppression to tell the sufferings suffered by black American women. As an African-American writer who writes a story of black American women through a third-person narrative, she challenges black women’s identity through her richness use of language. Beloved was then, on 1988, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and Morrison herself, on 1993, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in Lorain, Ohio on 1931, Morrison’s real name was Chloe Anthony Wofford and she has published many novels before Beloved, namely The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Jazz. What interests me to do research on Morrison is the content of all her fictions − suffering of black Americans under slavery and racial oppression – that questions me whether her narrative is her act of protest against slavery or her recollection of her past memories. The Bluest Eye, published on 1969, was set In Ohio – her hometown – which becomes another consideration as whether Morrison is narrating her past or even that of her family as her great grandmother lived under slavery. I would like to focus my essay on three of her novels by Morrison to figure out the motifs behind her fictions.